In more than one in 10 coupled Canadian families in which one parent stays home, dad is the one doing the laundry, cooking and child care, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday in a snapshot that reveals just how much the face of work and family life has changed in recent decades.

“Within the past five years, I think the biggest and most significant change has been the role of fathers in the household,” said Nora Spinks, CEO of the Vanier Institute of the Family, in response to the study, which also found the number of dual-income families with children has nearly doubled since the mid-70s — from 36% in 1976 to 69% in 2014.

In 1976, stay-at-home dads made up 2% of coupled families with at least one child under age 16 and one parent staying home. In 2014, they made up 11%.

A major spike amongst stay-at-home dads was noted in 2010, after the recession hit male-dominated industries far more than female. But while circumstance may have thrown a lot of men into the caregiver role, their relative ranks created a sustained shift in the social perception of stay-at-home dads that has impacted everything from portrayals in advertising to the way grocery stores are designed.

The Stats Can report highlighted regional shifts over time: Saskatchewan and Quebec had the highest proportion of dual-income families in 2014 — 74% and 73% respectively — which is a big jump from 40% in the prairie province in 1976 and 29% in Quebec. The lowest proportion of dual-earner families was in Alberta, with 65% in 2014. Interestingly, Alberta, however, had the greatest number of dual-earner families in 1976, at 43%.

“I think it’s a reminder of the speed at which things are actually changing,” Spinks said.

The biggest shift — one that has impacted the entire Western world — has been the fact that women have re-entered the workforce at a great pace in the 1980s after having children. That fundamentally shifted the dynamics of the household, she said.

“That changed the dynamics in the community, that changed parenting. That change was massive,” she said.

“The flip side of that is that men had to step up while she was at work.”

Dads are not just taking care of household affairs — things like laundry and groceries — but they’re caring for children, disabled siblings, spouses and parents, Spinks added.

“These new dads were the first generation of kids in the ’80s and into the ’90s that experienced separation and divorce in a big way, but more importantly co-parenting and joint-custody,” she said.

At the same time, baby boomers’ continued presence in the workforce has meant less inter-generational family support, Spinks said. That generation of people — turning 65 at a rate of 1 every 7 seconds in North America, Spinks said — is still working and can’t afford to take time off.

“So somebody has to be there when the midwife goes home and mom and baby come home from the hospital,” she said. “Dads are stepping up.”

Families also don’t live in as close proximity to one another as in generations before — grandma might be in Hong Kong or Dubai, Spinks said — so couples do the math and figure out what makes the most sense financially when it comes to care arrangements. In a double-income family, that sometimes means dad.

“The gender gap is basically gone when it come to care and caring and household management and household finances,” Spinks said. “It’s the other side of the coin — women are stepping up and taking on greater responsibilities for outside work in a home, everything from day to day financial management to investments.”

The dads of today are “full on,” in terms of control over household affairs, Spinks said. Fathers in the ’80s might have indeed done the grocery shopping, she pointed out, but they were using a list written by their wives. Now, elements of grocery stores across North America have been tweaked to better suit the male shopper — everything from taller carts to moving the sale items up a shelf higher.

It is hard for adults to look at kids today and not find them wanting when it comes to self-sufficiency and independence.

Those “I used to walk 10 miles to school in the snow when I was your age” remarks get mocked for their tendency toward exaggeration. Surely even the longest and most difficult routes couldn’t have been uphill in both directions. Yet the adults still have a point: Whether helicopter parents or a loss of a sense of community is to blame, kids today really don’t get much of a chance to steer their own ships.

They are walked or driven to and from school by parents or nannies, and they ride their bikes in circles around concrete recreation areas, while a caregiver looks on from a nearby bench. Kids today do not do things like cross busy streets by themselves, or go out to play alone with their siblings at a park.

Except that occasionally they do, and what happens next says a lot about how strong our inclination has become to turn over parenting to governments, judges or pretty much anyone but parents. You may have heard of Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, a Maryland couple who have been allowing their children, ages six and 10, to walk to and from a nearby park by themselves. The Meitivs apparently believe in free-range parenting and think their kids’ development benefits from the independent fresh-air walks and play.

But the kids have been picked up by the authorities three times now for walking unsupervised by an adult, and relatively hostile encounters between Child Protective Services (CPS) and the parents have followed. On the last occasion, a couple of weeks ago, police picked up the Meitiv children on their way home from the park and brought them to CPS.

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The kids were kept for hours at a crisis centre before CPS finally notified their worried parents, who didn’t know why the normally responsible youngsters hadn’t made it back home by the agreed upon time. It seems the young Meitivs are able to safely navigate all the dangers of their local streets but one: law enforcement.

Do the Meitivs have the right approach to parenting? I really don’t know. I used to walk to and from the local park “alone” with a friend when we were 10-years old — and once we got there we’d go tobogganing down steep, treed hills, while wearing no helmets. I think every aspect of that experience has since been banned, and I was a very risk-averse kid; but at the time, the whole thing seemed unremarkable and I enjoyed it.

On the other hand, as a parent, I’m not sure I could get over the guilt if I let my own children do the same and ended up having to take them to the emergency room with a broken limb, a concussion or worse. And out of my three kids, only one of them has the temperament to view such a lone excursion as a welcome adventure, rather than an anxiety-provoking outing, anyway.

But while I may not be certain that the Meitivs have the right approach to parenting, I do feel sure that they should maintain the right to parent. That means that, save for truly abusive or absurdly negligent actions (no one’s arguing the right to send a two-year-old on his own to the grocery store), the choice about when their kids are old enough to venture out unsupervised really should be theirs.

If we think the state should intervene in a family every time we’d personally make a different parental decision, then we’re basically asking the state to choose and enforce one style of parenting. We’re asking the state to be the one to decide what would be best for the development and flourishing of our children.

If you ask me, that’s a much better recipe for the dereliction of parental duty than allowing parents to make conscious, if sometimes controversial, choices about where their kids may roam.

National Post

Marni Soupcoff is executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (theccf.ca). msoupcoff@theccf.ca

In a recent column for Bloomberg View, I suggested that the U.S. should help the millennial generation make the transition out of youthful poverty by forgiving some of their mountainous student debt. One positive effect of that bailout, I argued, would be to boost American fertility rates, which have fallen since 2007. I think that the difficulty of raising a family in the U.S. is a problem that needs a more comprehensive solution.

In general, having a fertility rate of around 2.1 is optimal. That’s because 2.1 children per woman is the level where a population sustains itself. The closer you get to replacement fertility, the less you have to worry about either a population explosion or a collapse. Right now, most developed countries are dealing with the latter problem, a development that threatens their pension systems and raises the number of dependants that each worker has to support.

The U.S., until recently, bucked this trend, for two main reasons. The first is that we had very high fertility rates among Hispanic immigrants. The second is that we had very high teen pregnancy for a rich country. Both of these factors are now disappearing — fertility has plummeted among Hispanics, and teen pregnancy is way down. So now we seem to be facing the same aging issue that is bedevilling the rest of the developed world. It’s worth noting that, since the 2007-09 recession, the fertility rates of rich countries such as France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. have actually risen, while that of the U.S. has fallen by more than 11%.

What can we do about it?

Most policies that try to raise fertility fail. Exhorting people to have more children has little effect, and paying them doesn’t seem to do much better. These policies also smack of government interference in people’s personal lives, which Americans are not alone in despising.

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But a few rich countries have managed to buck the trend, and have achieved fertility rates that are very close to replacement level. The most important of these countries is France. According to the World Bank, French fertility rates are now at 2.01, compared with 1.88 for the U.S.

What is France’s secret sauce? It helps to think about the reasons that it’s so hard to raise a family in a developed country. Raising a kid costs huge amounts of money. First of all, you probably have to get a bigger house. Food and transportation are big expenses. Health care, including extras like braces, takes a big bite. And then there’s college, which is becoming out of reach for more and more families.

But the biggest cost of raising a child may simply be time. Time that you spend taking care of the kids is time that you don’t spend at work earning money. In the ideal situation, both parents would have flexible work situations, and both would take time off to share child-care duties. Unfortunately, most of us don’t live that dream. Many have rigid work schedules, and often put in many extra hours at home or at the office — Americans work longer hours than almost anyone in the developed world. And many are single parents. What that means is that a lot of American parents are forced to make an all-or-nothing choice between the workplace and child care.

These days, even Japanese women are more likely to work than their American counterparts

The demanding U.S. workplace may also be preventing women from fully joining the workforce. French women don’t just have more babies than American women, they also are more likely to get a job. The U.S., which was a leader in female labour force participation in the 1990s, has fallen behind. These days, even Japanese women are more likely to work than their American counterparts.

France, by helping parents with the costs of child rearing, may be reaping the benefit both in higher fertility and in increased female labour force participation. In a 2012 white paper, Marie-Laure des Brosses, president of Make Mothers Matter France, explained the situation. Huffington Post writer Emily Peck summarizes the paper’s findings:

“The French government has just been much more aggressive about enacting policies that help families and support women who want to have children and keep working. And the policies work. Not only do a huge majority of French women work, France also has the second-highest birth rate in Europe, after Ireland.… Nearly one-third of the gap between the U.S. and the other countries, when it comes to the percentage of women who work, can be traced to the United States’ pitiful work-family policies.”

For one thing, French parents get paid parental leave from work. The amount of paid leave actually increases as you have more children. The law gives women more leave than men (defying France’s stereotype as a gender-neutral country), but paternal leave is substantial as well.

The U.S., in contrast, has no paid parental leave, only unpaid.

France also has abundant child care. The government has sponsored a large number of options for child-care services, including public daycare, subsidized private daycare, part-time nannies and company daycare. In the U.S., in contrast, child-care services are very sporadic.

Real pro-family policies will raise both the fertility rate and the female labour force participation rate. President Barack Obama’s plan, which he sketched out in his recent State of the Union address, is a start. But to really make life easier for American families, we might want to look to the French model.

Bloomberg News

Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a freelance writer for finance and business publications.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/noah-smith-what-can-be-done-to-reverse-americas-falling-birthrate/feed1stdbabyfbSocial bond: Saskatchewan tries new way to finance single mothers in needhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/social-bond-saskatchewan-tries-new-way-to-finance-single-mothers-in-need
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/social-bond-saskatchewan-tries-new-way-to-finance-single-mothers-in-need#commentsFri, 23 May 2014 22:28:03 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=468727

It’s a beautiful two-storey house on a nice street in downtown Saskatoon, with a tidy lawn that blends in amongst its well-kept neighbours.

Inside, floral upholstered couches and comforter-covered beds fill the rooms — rooms that will soon all be occupied by single moms and their children, housed there as part of a new social program designed to support these at-risk families and keep them intact.

The home, called Sweet Dreams, is a huge opportunity for these women, who will be offered parenting and literacy skills and the tools they need to work, go to school and raise their kids.

“I would have had to give up school just to be able to provide for my son, and if I wanted to stay in school, maybe I would have had to have given him to someone else,” said Chantal McLaren, who will work at Sweet Dreams while training to be a nurse.

But it’s just as big an opportunity for the Saskatchewan government, as it claims its stake as the first Canadian province to launch a program using the social impact bond (SIB) funding model — a new way of supporting a community development project that wouldn’t otherwise get government money.

Instead of getting funding from government grants and charitable donations, social programs are funded, in part, by private investors — people, banks or corporations — who invest a significant amount of cash in a project over three to five year term in the hopes of being paid back if the project is successful. It’s not a bond in the traditional sense; there’s a fixed time period, but no fixed rate of return. And the goal is built around achieving outcomes — if the program meets its target in a set period of time, the government pays the investors back with interest. If it doesn’t, the investors don’t get their money back at all.

Last week, Regina-based Conexus Credit Union invested $500,000 in the Sweet Dreams home, run by EGADZ Saskatoon Downtown Youth Centre. Saskatoon couple Wally and Colleen Mah matched that amount. By 2019, Sweet Dreams aims to have 22 children and their mothers leave the home and stay together as family units for at least six months. Investors will receive a portion of their investment back if 17 to 21 children are kept out of foster care, plus 5% interest — a profit of $25,000. They will not be reimbursed at all if fewer than 17 children stay with their mothers.

It’s an appealing concept in an era of tightened government budgets and at a time in which corporate social responsibility and social enterprise is de rigeur. Proponents see this as an exciting and promising way to tackle complicated, long-term social problems without burdening the taxpayer.

The United Kingdom is seeing recidivism rates reduced as a result of this model. In its budget proposal for 2014, the Obama administration signalled its support for “pay-for-success” programs, giving states and municipalities the ability to spearhead their own SIBs. Canada is also keen on it — Conservative cabinet minister Diane Finley, in her former role as minister of human resources and social development, gathered input from Canadians on how to introduce social finance into government funding models. A handful of federally-guided pilot projects are already charging ahead.

Saskatchewan’s minister of social services June Draude, who spearheaded the Sweet Dreams initiative, says it’s even politically popular, a bi-partisan home-run.

“I know that when you raise taxes, you’re affecting low-income taxpayers as well,” Ms. Draude said. “We need to make sure we keep as much money as possible in the pockets of individuals and let them [decide] how they would like to spend their money.”

She calls the project “innovative,” “flexible,” and “a new way of looking at social issues.”

Critics and skeptics have another word for it: A “fad.” They fear pay-for-performance models, which are too young to have solid proof they actually work, just allow governments to back out of funding important social programs, or leave future leaders on the hook for paying out investors. There’s also a fear that governments are flinging the door open to corporate interests.

“It’s in vogue at present for governments who don’t really want to invest in social services,” said David McDonald, senior economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa. He calls it a “terrible public policy idea.”

“There’s no real need to pay 20% [in interest] to some bank or some financier to fund social programs,” he said, adding that there’s also no real risk of failure.

“What’s happened is these financiers have inserted themselves in the social contract and they’re acting as middle men. They don’t take on any particular risk, but they’re paid the middle man markup.”

Mr. McDonald believes the taxpayer will “almost certainly” pay more later and other social programs will be “cannibalized” in order to meet the three or five year targets of the ones tied to social impact bonds.

But pay-for-success models are often sorely misunderstood, said Bill Pinakiewicz, a vice-president at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, an American consultancy based in New York City.

“One of the major misconceptions is that somehow governments are not meeting historic obligations to fund these social services. That’s not the case at all,” he said.

When governments are under pressure, some of the first programs they cut or decline to fund are the ones that meet a preventative and long-term — something like the goal of Sweet Dreams, which is to help these women become contributing members of society and raising their children as such too.

The government, he said, is the “ultimate payer.” While it’s too early for a success story in the United States, the fact that Massachusetts recently announced it will use a social impact bond model to fight youth crime gives the concept a huge boost. The $18 million bond, backed by Goldman Sachs, The Kresge Foundation and others, will become the largest social impact bond in U.S. history.

Another misconception is the looming spectre of public-private partnership — dirty words in the minds of some.

“The transfer of risk is not privatization as commonly understood,” wrote Adam Jagalewski, associate director of the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing, in an email. “SIBs fund nonprofit [not private] programs that government doesn’t exclusively provide.”

The social impact bond started at Peterborough prison in the United Kingdom, 2010. Recidivism was a huge issue, and sporadic programs were too flimsy and unsustainable to halt the cycle of repeat offenders. So a group that eventually became the organized not-for-profit Social Finance U.K. drew up a plan that would have one group of people paying for interventions built on best practices, and another for results.

It’s appeared to have worked: recidivism levels are significantly down as the project heads into its fifth and final year.

The program is judged on a “frequency metric, said Alisa Helbitz, director of research and communications at Social Finance U.K. This urges them to focus on the hardest people going in and out of prison sometimes 20 times rather than one-time offenders. Now, the U.K. government is even introducing a new tax relief to encourage people to invest in SIB programs.

Canada’s minister of employment and social development, Jason Kenney, even paid a visit to Britain recently to look at the Peterborough example, said Jane Newman, Social Finance U.K.’s International director, who has also been working with the social impact investing team at MaRS.

“Governments are not always best placed to solve the most pressing or persistent social and economic problems,” Eric Morrissette, spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada wrote in an email to the National Post. “There are Canadians who possess innovative solutions to these problems and there are others who are willing to fund ‘social entrepreneurs’ in meeting these challenges.”

The federal Office of Literacy and Essential Skills is working on a pilot to test elements of the SIB model with an eye to boost labour market outcomes. The model is also being used to help social enterprises such as the Toronto Enterprise Fund. An international report on social impact investment is due out in September.

As the first province to give this a try, Saskatchewan is going to “walk before we run,” Ms. Draude said.

Don Meikle, acting executive director of EGADZ Youth Centre, the operators of Sweet Dreams, says the bond model removes the constant struggle of trying to secure new funding. The centre already works on an outcomes based model, so the investment expectations aren’t too big a stretch. The investors’ presence adds a new layer of accountability that translates to higher motivation to succeed.

As one of the investors, Ms. Mah saw the Sweet Dreams SIB as an “intriguing” opportunity to make a lasting difference for an organization they’ve supported many times in the past.

“I sometimes think we just give money to organizations and nobody reports back results,” she said. “Now you’ve got some skin in the game.”

To her, the real return on investment is seeing these women and their children blossom into contributing members of society.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/social-bond-saskatchewan-tries-new-way-to-finance-single-mothers-in-need/feed3stdChantal-McLarenNayan Sthankiya for National PostWhy many women are putting their careers on pause to have children while in their 20shttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/why-women-should-have-babies-before-25
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/why-women-should-have-babies-before-25#commentsFri, 10 May 2013 22:12:58 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=306385

Tanya Granic Allen was an upwardly mobile 20-something woman in Toronto: She lived in a Bay Street condo, worked at least 60 hours a week as a political staffer at City Hall, went out “constantly” with friends, and hosted fabulous parties.

“I always thought I’d be married to my job until I was at least 40,” she said.

But then, at age 25, she and her husband-to-be found themselves at a fertility clinic, mapping out her cycle and making sure they were in good fertile health. By 26, they were married. And by 27, she was pregnant, having made a very “counter-cultural” decision for many women in her peer group and at her station in life.

“We said ‘You know what? If we’re going to have kids, the statistics show us it’s best to pop out a kid by your 30s’ …You don’t know what kind of problems may lay ahead,” said Ms. Granic Allen, now a 32-year-old mother of three. “In hindsight, I’m so glad we did. I can’t imagine being 40 and having a child. I just can’t fathom it.”

Illustration by Kagan McLeod

What seems unfathomable for Ms. Granic Allen — having a newborn at 40 — would be considered a gift by a rising number of Canadian women who have worked hard at their careers or met their soulmate late only to struggle through rounds of IVF in a desperate bid to conceive.

Generations ago, young mothers were the norm. But women’s sustained entry into the workforce, and the higher levels of education necessary to get ahead, have made them a modern day anomaly.

The age of first-time mothers has been on a steady upswing for almost half a century, rising from 23.5 in the mid-1960s to 28 in 2008, according to Statistics Canada data, which captures all socioeconomic groups and regions that have maintained more traditional paths to building a family. The age of all Canadian mothers has been on the rise from 27 in the early 1970s to 29 in 2008 — in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, mothers are even older. If you’re an educated, middle or upper-middle class woman in Canada today, there’s an expectation that babies will be pushed to the backburner for as long as possible.

But the delay can be misguided and, in hindsight, a very bad mistake. Having children earlier, a growing number of advocates argue, makes sense for a number of reasons.

Some ambitious women in their 20s are choosing to start families young, pressing pause on a career they plan to kick into high gear when their children are older rather than disappear from a successful job at the most inflexible time. These women report having lots of energy for their children, and like the thought of still being in their 40s when their children are in high school. They say their bodies bounced back quickly and life as they knew it changed, but didn’t disappear.

‘If people could have kids in their 20s and it works for them, that would be the way to go for sure’

“There are societal pressures everybody faces: The amount of education you need to get the same job 30 years ago is increasing and we know that people are certainly waiting — that causes a problem for many,” said Dr. Jason Hitkari, co-director of Olive Fertility Centre in Vancouver. “If people could have kids in their 20s and it works for them, that would be the way to go for sure,” he said, adding that egg freezing is a good, yet expensive option for young women who want to but aren’t yet ready to conceive, costing about $10,000-$11,000.

Even still, young people in pursuit of that education with plans for a house, a car and a big family are woefully undereducated about fertility.

A 2012 study in the U.K. journal Human Reproduction found that 67% of university-aged women and 81% of their male counterparts who say they want children inaccurately think female fertility markedly declines after age 40. That steep decrease actually happens from age 35 to 39.

Across North America there are still pockets in which it’s normal to be a young mother, says Michelle Horton, founder of EarlyMama.com, a website devoted to “redefining the young mom.” When she got pregnant with her son at 22 she was living in hipster-heavy Brooklyn, where it’s virtually unheard of to have a child under 30.

“We are in this generation where we have heard all of our lives you’re supposed to get your career done first, you’re supposed to do things in this proper order,” she said. “But we’re also seeing the generation before us struggling with infertility and saying ‘Gosh I wish I should have realized there’s no perfect time to have a kid and if it was really important to me, I should have done it before my fertility expired.

‘‘Some people are starting to come around and realize having a kid in your 20s isn’t the worst thing for you.”

An essay published in a March issue of The New York Times Sunday Review recently put the idea of having a child in one’s 20s and in higher education on the table.

Anna Jesus was just starting medical school when she was diagnosed with hypothalamic amenorrhea, a form of infertility that would make it harder for her to have children. Her doctors told her to start trying. She was 27.

“You must think I’m insane to be doing this now,” she said to one of her professors. Instead he replied, “No, actually, I think you’re smart.”

Some of her professors even told her they’d wish they had children earlier in their careers, the University of Pennsylvania med student said in an interview.

“It almost felt like I was worried they’d feel I was irresponsible by putting my family ahead of my medical school ambitions,” she said. “[But] I don’t feel like I’m derailing my career at all … In grad school you have the option of taking time off, you don’t have a commitment to an employer.”

Veronica Callaghan PhotographyTanya Granic Allen and her husband, Jonathan, decided to have their children Katherine, 4, William, 3, and Philippa, 19 months, while in their 20s.

Jennifer Jones and her husband Reece were surprised by how strong the social pressure was to hold off having a family for as long as possible.

The London, Ont. couple married at 21, had bought a house and were putting each other through post-secondary school — the first among their friends to “settle down.” It wasn’t long before they contemplated kids.

“We felt secure financially, we felt secure in our relationship. So we thought ‘What are we waiting for?’” she said. But they did wait — until they were 25. “Basically the only reason we were waiting was for those social norms, that most people on average are having them in their early 30s,” she said.

She has a girlfriend who is 40 with one small child and a baby on the way but wonders if she’ll be able to have more. Meanwhile, Ms. Jones (who has a health sciences degree, owns the local chapter of Momstown, an online and in-person social network for moms, and works part-time at a hospice) plans on multiple children, and knows she can even space them out by a number of years.

In the meantime, however, she has to deal with being mistaken for a teen mom when she is out with Ryan, her 15-month-old son.

“I think people are maybe just used to seeing older moms now,” she said. “I definitely get looks and sneers.” She also tries to be extra vigilant on the playground to avoid being judged as a woman not yet mature or responsible enough to be a mother.

‘Basically the only reason we were waiting was for those social norms’

There are plenty of reasons babies are not on the radar for 20-something women: student debt, the ultra-competitive job market, the precarious nature of work, the high cost of real estate, and the uneven ratio of women to men at universities have contributed to marriage and parenthood delays. A culture of self-actualization, which seems to value personal gratification above all, is emphasized in this generation, making the concept of raising a child seem preposterous to many.

“I think that taking the 20s off the table the way we have done if we want to be upwardly mobile at all doesn’t leave us a lot of room,” said Judith Shulevitz, the science editor at The New Republic whose December cover story ‘How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society’ stoked debate on the possible costs of having children over 40.

“I’m not saying everybody has to go have babies in their 20s because I wasn’t going to. But I think as a society if we take that off the table for anyone who wants to be part of the upper middle class and a woman who wants to independently be there, not reliant on a husband, it’s tough.”

FotoliaWomen who start their families while in their 20s report having lots of energy for their children.

After sifting through the troubling signs displayed in the study of how genes inherit changes over time and considering the social impacts of older parenthood — that older sperm may contribute a larger role to birth defects than originally thought; the developmental issues that affect children of parents over 40; the prospect of being a senior when your child is still in school — she calls for a policy re-think that will help encourage baby-making earlier on.

In 2005, Princeton University reset its tenure clock, automatically extending it for professors who become parents; Ms. Shulevitz argues institutions should go even further.

“It’s incredibly hard to raise young children and get serious work done,” she said in an interview. “Another way [governments and employers] could do this is say ‘We want our young men and women to have families and we’re going to find ways to stop the clock.’”

In the meantime, Ms. Granic Allen says she refuses to be “pigeonholed” as a person who is missing out on something because she pursued parenthood instead of pressing ahead in a promising career.

She’s kept a hand in politics, doing some consulting, working on campaigns. She believes she can return to full-time working life and be even better, once her children are school age and she has more time for herself.

It’s also given her perspective.

“After having kids I’ve definitely switched my mentality,” she said. “I want to work to live now, not the other way around.”

Akua Schatz and Brendon Purdy have trouble finding space for a coffee table, not to mention the baby they are expecting this fall.

The couple, both in their mid-30s, live in a 500 square foot home in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Dunbar. Completed last year for $280,000, the modernist two-storey home stands on what used to be Mr. Purdy’s parents’ backyard.

While the style may be precedent-setting for Vancouver, they are not alone in living small. Increasingly, young families in the city’s constricted housing market are eschewing a distant suburban address for the ease and walkability of the core – even if it means doing it without enough space for a Christmas tree.

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From post-war bungalows to 1990s McMansions, the Canadian house has spent the last 60 years progressively ballooning into one of the largest domiciles in history. But amid shrinking lot sizes, skyrocketing land prices and a new generation of homeowners uninterested in the lures of suburban life, the ever-expanding Canadian house has finally reached its apex. After decades of pushing the limits of human dwellings, Canada’s unbridled passion for square footage is coming to an end.

“Smaller space, bigger lifestyle,” said Ms. Schatz.

Ben Nelms for National PostBrendon Purdy and Akua Schatz in the bedrooom of their 500-square-foot home in Vancouver. The $280,000 modernist two-storey home stands on what used to be Mr. Purdy’s parents’ backyard.

In 1947, to accommodate a wave of post-war home construction, the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation began publishing catalogues of housing plans drawn up by prominent Canadian architects. They were cheap and well-planned, but shockingly to modern eyes, they were often no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The typical Canadian of the Louis St. Laurent era, it seems, was raising pre-birth control-sized families in homes half the size of a volleyball court.

“Canadians were pretty down-to-earth people in those days. They bought as much as they could afford and expanded later if they could afford it,” Canadian architectural historian Ioana Teodorescu told Postmedia in 2009.

And expand they did. Powder rooms, family rooms, enclosed garages; by 1975 home sizes had jumped to 1,075 square feet. But still, their children, the Baby Boomers, shared bedrooms and coped with the weekday morning ritual of waiting for a spot in the home’s only bathroom.

Crazed for elbow room, when the Boomers finally seized the reins of home ownership in the 1980s, all hell broke loose: Wide hallways, gargantuan entrance halls, mud rooms. By the turn of the millennium, Canadians lived in some of the world’s largest houses – and were filling them with some of the world’s smallest families. In 2002, a U.K. market analyst lined up developed countries according to how many of its citizens owned homes with more than five rooms. Canada easily bested Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand for the top spot.

But then, by 2007, the meteoric growth of Canadian houses began to slow to a trickle, according to floor size data compiled by Natural Resources Canada. In its latest industry survey, the Canadian Home Builders Association reported that the average new home size had dropped to 1,900 square feet – well down from a mid-2000s peak of 2,300 square feet. According to internal forecasts, they are only going to get smaller, reported the association.

Photo: Brendon PurdyVancouver started approving laneway houses, such as the one belonging to Brendon Purdy and Akua Schatz, in 2009.

Craig Alexander, chief economist of TD Bank Financial Group, says that Canadian cities simply ran out of space. In the 1950s, the CMHC’s “catalogue homes” were often plunked down in a sea of grass. Over the years, lot sizes stayed pretty much the same, but builders added storeys, dug out basements and pushed the front steps to the sidewalk. “We’ve gone from land rich and house poor to land poor and house rich,” said Mr. Alexander. “If the square footage has levelled off, it’s probably because we’re building the biggest homes we possibly can on the existing lots,” he said.

Following the 2008 U.S. housing market collapse, new U.S. homes immediately sloughed off the equivalent of a large bedroom and by 2011, the American Institute of Architects reported that cash-conscious homeowners were increasingly shrugging off the “special” features of decades past: Mud rooms, home theatres and outdoor living rooms. Canada, too, is witnessing the slow death of walk-in closets, hobby rooms and even the once-ubiquitous living room. “We haven’t built a living room in the past two years,” Greg Graham with Ottawa’s Cardel Homes, told Postmedia in April.

The British, inventors of the lawn, can now claim the smallest homes of all, with the average new home clocking in at just over 800 square feet. “Room to swing a cat? Hardly,” commented the BBC. Tellingly, while Prime Minister Stephen Harper occupies a mansion in Ottawa, his U.K. counterpart occupies a non-descript townhouse jammed into downtown London.

“If you take the typical Canadian home and take out all the wasted space, you have a European home,” said Mr. Friedman, speaking by Skype from Northern France, where he is midway through a tour of European housing projects. “They’ll have the same number of rooms, the same uses, but they will all be smaller.”

National Post filesBy the turn of the millennium, Canadians lived in some of the world’s largest houses - and were filling them with some of the world’s smallest families.

Luckily, two decades of condo building have already steeled Canadians for the realities of tiny spaces. Last year, a slate of new Vancouver developments offering condos as small as 400 square feet – about two-thirds the size of a Skytrain car. But what the micro-condos lack in square footage, they are balancing with efficient design: Tight entranceways, smaller bedrooms and a rabid aversion to hallways.

House builders are taking the hint. “People are doing with less space, but they want it to be a richer experience,” said Ben Taddei, COO of ParkLane Homes, a Vancouver-area house builder. “Large landings, sweeping staircases, those have all gone the way of the dodo bird.” Where past homes counted separate dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens, Mr. Taddei’s designers simply combine them all into a single “great room.”

The Milllennials, the generation born from 1983 onwards, enjoyed a childhood free of bunkbeds or even shared bathrooms. Growing up in plush megahomes undoubtedly helped them become, in the words of one author, “self-centred, needy, and entitled with unrealistic work expectations.” Oddly, it also spawned a group of people patently unimpressed with backyards and breakfast nooks.

Under current economic forecasts, Millennials are poised to spend their early adulthood decidedly less affluent than their parents. They are also facing a housing market that has outpaced income growth for well over a decade. Mr. Friedman calls it a “perfect storm of phenomena” that is making homebuyers “physically and psychologically comfortable” in small spaces, said Mr. Friedman. Condo towers and row-houses will continue to sprout, he predicts, and as boomers vacate their large suburban houses for retirement, developers and municipalities will carve them up into apartments, duplexes and laneway houses.

“In 2006, the market peaked and everybody got back to the idea of ‘We’ve got to make houses smaller and we’ve got to make them more affordable,” said Brian Johnston, COO of Mattamy Corp., Canada’s largest builder of new homes. “I don’t think it’s a matter of personal preference, people just can’t afford to live in those big houses anymore.”

You’re looking at three-hour commutes, and I just don’t want to spend my life doing that

Except, of course, in Alberta. In the land of $85,000 median wages and dirt-cheap housing lots, young families are still snapping up giant, single-family homes like it’s still 1985.

“Edmonton has more space per person than any major city in Canada,” Sarah MacLennan, marketing director with Edmonton’s Coldwell Banker Johnston Real Estate, wrote in an email to the Post. “Our average single family home size has actually gone up.” While other cities cope with forests of new downtown condo towers, in Edmonton’s centralized areas schools are starting to shut down due to low attendance.

In Calgary, even the condos are 4,000 square foot “monsters,” said Bob Jablonski, president of the Calgary Real Estate Board. “There’s a lot of money in Calgary, old and new,” he said.

Fifty years ago, when land was cheap and the asphalt on Vancouver’s Highway 99 were still fresh, Ms. Schatz says it is quite likely she and her husband would have sprung for a typical white-picket fence home in the suburbs. But now, with suburban isolation, a regional smog cloud and clogged highways to worry about, the choice was easy. “You’re looking at three-hour commutes, and I just don’t want to spend my life doing that,” she said.

And their plan is conveniently inter-generational: The grandparents in the nearby big house will help babysit, Ms. Schatz and Mr. Purdy – both in their mid-30s – will help them with household repairs. Eventually, said Ms. Schatz, the two will switch places.

Since Vancouver gave the green light to laneway houses in 2009, the city has received 500 applications, with 50 new applications trickling in every month. With the massive single-family home increasingly out of reach for all but the wealthiest buyers, said Mr. Friedman, the middle-class entrants are instead “seeking comfort in other things.”

For Ms. Schatz, at least, her tiny house has put her only a 10-minute bike ride from work, a short walk from the beach and in a home just cramped enough to push them outside on sunny days. “People can sacrifice space for that,” she said.

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday took aim Thursday at a push by downtown councillors to get developers to build more condo units big enough for families, suggesting that the congested core is not the “ideal” place to raise children.

Mr. Holyday, the former mayor of Etobicoke who still represents the area, says that he wouldn’t want to raise his kids on King Street or Yonge Street.

“Maybe some people wish to do that, I think most people wouldn’t. I could just see now, ‘Where’s little Jenny? Well, she’s downstairs playing in the traffic on her way to the park,” he told City Council.

Mr. Holyday made the remarks while debating a new 47-storey tower on King Street’s historic “restaurant row”, which must have at least 10% of units as three bedrooms. Mr. Holyday had sought to delete that requirement, which he called social engineering, but it was his comments about where to raise children that prompted immediate heckling from his colleagues.

Brett Gundlock/National Post filesDoug Holyday

“Are you serious?” asked Councillor Josh Matlow as he rose to question the deputy mayor. “Do you really believe that there is some danger to children by living in the downtown area?”

“I certainly think it’s really not the ideal place where people might want to raise their families,” replied Mr. Holyday, who has brought up two sons, and lives a few doors away from his three grandchildren on a quiet suburban street. “But on the other hand, if they do, I’m willing to leave the choice up to them, councillor. I’m not going to dictate to a developer that they must provide 10% of their units in the three bedroom form when there may or may not be a market for it.” Afterwards, he stressed that he is not trying to tell people where to bring up their kids, just that he personally wouldn’t want to do it downtown.

City planners initially rejected the tower at 323-333 King Street West, corner of John Street, at 39 stories. The developer then bought the adjacent property and redrew the tower at 47 stories, with 304 units. The new design, which preserves the facade of heritage buildings on the site, won council approval Thursday.

Businesses in the area oppose the plan, said Al Carbone, the owner of the long standing Italian eatery Kit Kat, who attended the council meeting.

“I’m very disappointed city council doesn’t have any vision,” said Mr. Carbone, who plans to fight the project at the Ontario Municipal Board.

If you’re going to ban kids in the downtown core, you might as well ban sex because it’s creating a lot of kids

Councillor Adam Vaughan said the city has already tried fighting these types of buildings at the OMB and lost.

City Council also upheld the provision that some of the units be three bedrooms.

Gregg Lintern, the acting chief planner, said the city’s Official Plan calls for mixed housing in all parts of the city, and officials have tried to encourage that approach in the downtown with the 10% stipulation. “It just makes for a healthier city,” said Mr. Lintern, referencing the urban lifestyle of people living in Manhattan, or European cities.

The deputy mayor remained dubious. “I don’t know what planet he’s on,” said Councillor Adam Vaughan. “There are lots of families downtown, it’s a good place to raise kids, it’s where I’m raising my kids. And if you’re going to ban kids from the downtown core, you might as well ban sex because it’s creating a lot of kids down there.”

Mr. Holyday says he doesn’t want to ban anybody from anywhere. “If somebody wants to raise their family downtown, they’re certainly welcome to do that. [My lifestyle] is a little different and most people that I know are a little different.”

In 2008, while on the presidential campaign trail, Barack Obama’s Father’s Day message was: “[Black fathers] have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men, and the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

Such a public acknowledgment of African-Americans’ cultural plight was a courageous act of leadership. It raised hope in many observers that, as president, Obama would exploit his unprecedented political capital to address the great social scourge amongst African-Americans: An upward spiral since the 1950s of poor, single-family households, and the flight from fatherhood amongst black men.

But once he became president, Obama’s burst of candour was not followed up with public policy strategies or programs encouraging a return to committed relationships in the African-American community. On the contrary, this spring’s most talked-about Obama campaign ad could be called the president’s “Fatherless Day” message.

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The Life of Julia, an interactive web ad, features a faceless, affectless simulacrum of a middle-class American woman named Julia. As you click through her life cycle, the images highlight significant government-subsidized rites of passage — university graduation, career launch, motherhood and retirement — that demonstrate how increasingly supportive a second-term Obama would be in helping Julia realize all her major ambitions.

There is only one glaring omission in the ad: A father for the child Julia chooses to have. (Julia is not specifically described as a single mother, but the ad contains no mention of a husband or long-term partner.)

The ad clearly targets single women, especially those with children. And for a good political reason. There are 10 million more single women than single men in the United States. More than a quarter of the voting population, they are the group most likely to favour government patronage — particularly women with dependents. Between 2000-2010, the number of single women eligible to vote rose by 19%. Today, they are Obama’s to lose.

But research shows that when single women marry, or divorced women remarry, they begin to vote like other married women — that is, their voting trends rightward.

In purely arithmetic terms, therefore, Democrats have an interest in expanding the ranks of single unmarried women. And, in fact, The Life of Julia paints an alluring picture, implying single women can have it all — education, children, a secure retirement — without a man, but at no personal cost or sacrifice.

This implicit endorsement of single-parent families comprises a betrayal of fatherless children and most single mothers, especially African-Americans. The average black single mother looks nothing like Julia. She is not getting a university education, or starting her own business, or enjoying leisurely retirement. And by all accounts, she would happily trade subsidized poverty for a hardworking, committed father of her children by her side.

Blacks are the most unmarried group of people in America. (And in Canada: In Toronto’s black community, half the children are raised in single-parent homes, of which 80% are headed by women.) Their rates of marriage have been in steady decline for decades. Over 70% of black women, and half of black men, never marry. Moreover, black men are more likely to father more children by multiple partners than men from other groups.

Single motherhood has been exhaustively researched and its consequences widely distributed. Obama must know, or should know, that the “father deficit” is the single most reliable predictor for children’s diminished self-esteem, behavioural problems, poor grades and truancy, early school dropout, juvenile delinquency (85% of youth in prison have an absent father), gang membership, promiscuity, teen pregnancy, risk of sexual abuse, substance abuse and homelessness.

But acknowledging these facts when addressing single women voters will not advance Obama’s political fortunes. What will advance them is his false assurance that the state can bestow comparable value to what has traditionally been provided by husbands and fathers.

Here’s an irony: Monogamous Mormon Mitt Romney stands for strong nuclear families and smaller government. But what is Obama’s “hubby state,” with him at the helm supported by millions of single women dependents, if not plural political courtship on a massive scale?

Nobody doubts the sincerity of Barack Obama’s recent gay-marriage endorsement. But this usually cautious politician’s definitive self-outing is politically puzzling. After all, ordinary American blacks, Obama’s most loyal constituency, are just as opposed to gay marriage as white religious conservatives. Why take the chance of losing votes?

Gay marriage’s principal backers are white, educated, upper-middle-class urban liberals (WEUMCULs). Something to know about WEUMCULs: They finish school, get jobs and marry, only then have kids, and tend not to divorce. For example, marriage is flourishing in Toronto’s family-dense enclave of WEUMCUL Riverdale. But it is furiously eroding amongst American blacks, the least likely of identifiable minorities to marry (and the most likely to produce fatherless children).

WEUMCULs also dominate Canada’s punditariat. Too often they observe their own WEUMCUL social circle, or watch TV sitcoms anchored in WEUMCUL values, and from these experiences extrapolate erroneous conclusions about society as a whole.

One such WEUMCUL, Jonathan Kay, wrote a column in these pages on Saturday, hailing Obama’s statement as proof of a salutary shift in social attitudes. Like so many of his colleagues, Kay sees gay inclusion situated on a spectrum flagged at one end by overt homophobia, and at the other by gay marriage, anything short of which — even civil unions conferring equal benefits — he considers inequality.

Kay argues that marriage has been an “accelerant for further integration” of formerly promiscuous and rudderless gays, and furthermore that it is in social conservatives’ interest to approve gay marriage, since “it is the prospect and the possibility of marriage that makes us a society of homebodies, which is a wonderful thing to be.” As an example, he adduces the gay couple Mitchell and Cameron, of the ABC sitcom, Modern Family, avatars of a new breed: “neurotic homebodies first, gay men second.” Kay nicknames them “homebos.”

Beware the sitcom sociologue and his twin muses: superficiality and wishful thinking. Contra Kay, there is no indication that homebos Cameron and Mitchell led bathhouse-culture lives before settling down, or that it is marriage that has turned “lust into devotion.” In fact, this being a U.S. sitcom, they are likely not married, only cohabitating. I can’t tell. Unlike slavery or repressed speech, it’s an odd “inequality” that is indistinguishable from equality, producing no discernible sign to observers of the alleged injustice.

Anyway, what has made these particular chaps, and the vast majority of young heterosexuals, homebos isn’t even cohabitation; it is parenthood. Cameron and Mitchell’s daughter is the linchpin of their plotlines and domestic activities. But since only about 9% of gays choose to parent, the couple can hardly be called representative.

The other 91%? Many WEUMCULs, including me, have childless, homebo-type gay friends who are contentedly ensconced in monogamous, pipe-and-slipper lives. Some older ones were homebos before gay marriage was a gleam in ideologues’ eyes. Unpoliticized, they wanted social acceptance, which they got, but they had, and have, no desire for marriage, an institution they regard with complete equanimity as the natural preserve of heterosexuals.

And again, contra Kay, it is not “marriage” per se that preoccupies social conservatives, but families. Social conservatives believe children’s physical security and psychological needs are best served by a stable union of father and mother to whom they are biologically connected, as nature intended. Historical marriage happens to best facilitate that outcome, a view supported both by empirical observation and credible research.

Kay’s determination to find expansive common ground with both gays and conservatives is touching, but self-serving. For gay marriage does not add a single substantive element to cohabiting gays’ lived experience, since those 9% of gays (and 25% of lesbians) who parent are already high-functioning WEUMCULs, Kay would sacrifice society’s best hedge against cultural atrophy for the less socially advantaged on the altar of feel-goodiness — a common WEUMCUL temptation.

Crime and divorce rates are falling both in countries that offer gay marriage and in those that offer civil unions, so there is no causal link between them, as Kay implies. Whatever its symbolic benefits to individual gays, the normalization of gay marriage has been an accelerant to already-muddled public discourse that blurs the line between authentic, fundamental human rights and ideologically constructed “rights.” It has also been an accelerant to the trivialization of real marriage amongst constituencies, such as blacks and lower-class whites, who need it the most.

If empowering lower-echelon blacks were Obama’s real concern, he would use his enormous political capital to shore up traditional marriage amongst them. But it’s not. As his privileging of gay entitlement over ailing black culture demonstrates, inside Obama is a WEUMCUL through and through.

The federal government is making good on an election promise to repair Canada’s broken family reunification system by boosting the number of parents and grandparents accepted into Canada, imposing a moratorium on new applications and introducing a new “supervisa” for extended visits.

The plan announced Friday by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney calls for the admission of 25,000 parents and grandparents in 2012 — up 10,000 above 2011 targets and the highest level in nearly two decades.

The government will also impose a two-year moratorium on new applications and plans to introduce a 10-year, multiple-entry supervisa that would allow parents and grandparents to visit their loved ones in Canada for up to two years at a time.

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The initiatives are part of the government’s four-pronged approach to speeding up family reunification, which could now take as many as eight years.

It’s also meant to eliminate within five years a backlog in applications that has topped 165,000.

“The challenge we’re facing is a problem with math,” Kenney said in Mississauga, Ont., where he unveiled Phase I of the government’s action plan for faster family reunification.

“When the number of applications exceed the number admitted in the program, we end up with growing backlogs and longer wait times.”

Kenney said the government receives about 40,000 applications from parents and grandparents who wish to be reunited with loved ones every year.

At the current rate, he argued, wait times will exceed 10 years and the backlog will grow to 300,000 by the end of the decade.

Increasing the number of admissions alone — even doubling them — he said, won’t fix the problem, which is why the government will also spend the next two years consulting with stakeholders on a “redesign” of the parents and grandparents program to ensure it’s “sustainable in the long term.”

To prevent a “flood” of applications in the interim as people seek to get in before any “criteria change,” Kenney said the government will take a “temporary pause” on new applications.

“I understand that some people might be concerned about this but I would point out to them that if they send their application into our office today, they’re simply getting in the back of a seven- or eight-year-long waiting time. They’re no further ahead,” he said.

“We ask those people to be patient and to use the new supervisa that we’re offering them so mom and dad can come visit the grandkids in Canada for an extended period, allow us a little bit of time to start getting the backlog down, speeding up the wait times and then we will reopen the redesigned program in years time under new sustainable criteria.”

By the time Phase IIof the plan takes effect, Kenney said he hopes to have wait times for permanent residency down to just one or two years.

According to the Citizenship and Immigration Department, the supervisa will be open to would-be visitors as well as to individuals already in the queue for permanent residency who have demonstrated they have financial support while in Canada and who have medical clearance and private health insurance.

It will be available as of Dec. 1, and it’s anticipated that visas will be issued within eight weeks of receiving an application.

Ron Comeau and Elaine Tan Comeau and their three young children are a typical Canadian family – so typical, in fact, that their photo has been featured in ads by the Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP to promote their family-friendly agenda.

The photogenic Maple Ridge, B.C., couple and their eldest daughter, Abigail, 7, are the face of the family plank of the Liberal platform. A photo of Abigail, a red maple leaf painted on her cheek, was also featured in a Conservative Youtube ad in February trumpeting the party’s Canadian family values. And about a year ago, a colleague at a school where Ms. Comeau was teaching handed her an NDP pamphlet with the family’s picture on it.

The Comeaus are the kind of multicultural, middle-class family who federal politicians believe are most likely to vote for tax credits for children’s fitness programs and eco-friendly home renovations, for income-splitting and more government spending on child care. Every party has made family values a core focus of their campaign platform.

“It’s a part of the population that intrinsically no party by default has carved out for itself,” said Christian Leuprect, a political scientist with the Queen’s University Institute of Intergovernmental Relations. “It’s a genuine competition, an open field for anybody to grab among people who are more likely to change their mind than any other electoral segment in the country.”

As it happens, the Comeaus, who voted Conservative in 2008, are both working multiple jobs and getting over the flu. In between a recent two-week vacation and getting their daughter to softball practice on time they say they’ve been a bit too busy to pore over the deluge of family-focused promises coming from all of the parties in this election.

“I’m sure all the parties are tripping over each other to appeal to middle-class Canadian families if they think that’s where the votes come from,” said Mr. Comeau, a photographer who sells his family’s picture as stock images. ‘‘My family is so much more important to me than my relationship to any politician or political idea.’’

Even the Green Party — featuring a photo of a different young, suburban family who look remarkably like the Comeaus — are pitching their family-friendly policies ahead of the environment.

“The family is fashionable in a way that it wasn’t in the past,” said Sandford Borins, a professor of management at the University of Toronto who studies election narratives. “We have a family with young kids, so regardless of our political affiliation we’ve seen all these benefits directed at our demographic.”

Political scientists say there’s a good reason why parties are so keen to court the family vote in this election.

Of 308 seats up for grabs across the country, only about 45 are truly strategic swing ridings that could win either the Conservatives or the Liberals a majority government. Nearly 20 of those are in the suburban areas around Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, home to large concentrations of young, educated families. That includes 10 that the Conservatives lost by fewer than 1,000 votes in 2008.

Despite the country’s ageing population, young families are still a huge demographic in Canada. They made up about 18 million Canadians in the 2006 census. About 40% of those had children and most of those had more than one child.

Young two-parent families in their 30s and 40s are the most likely demographic to switch their vote as they shift from idealistic youth into adults with mortgages to pay and jobs to protect. Once they change their vote, studies have shown that they often stick with the party for years to come.

A family agenda is also a good way for parties to court recent immigrants, who tend to come from countries that honour family values and often have large families and live in multi-generational households.

“It’s a back door way of getting at the immigrant electorate without getting into hot water by talking about the ethnic vote,” Mr. Leuprecht said. “Family values is a sort of code for where you stand on the values agenda without giving other people the opportunity to attack you for having a hidden social agenda.”

The focus on family in the election is part of a larger political shift occurring in Canada with the advent of things such as the Family Day holiday in provinces like Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan, said Kathy Brock of Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies.

As governments grapple with rising costs for health care and social services, a family-centric message encourages people to look to their friends and neighbours, rather than their government for support.

“It fits with policies where you’re expecting individuals to take on a little more responsibility and not be so dependant upon the government, but rather to be dependant upon family,” Ms. Brock said. “It’s creating a place where there can be a mental shift toward embracing the community and embracing the people around you, rather than relying on the government. Both the Liberals and Conservatives are emphasizing that a lot.”

As for Mr. Comeau, he’d rather have have an income tax reduction so he has the freedom to choose the lifestyle he wants for his family, a policy that no party seems keen on promoting in this election.

“I don’t put a lot of stock in pre-election platforms,” the B.C. father said.

SAANICH, B.C. — The Conservatives will allow Canadian families with children under 18 to split up to $50,000 of their income annually to lower their taxes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Monday.

The tax-saving measure, the first of the Tories’ new promises in this election, was made by Harper on the third day of the campaign.

The initiative would cost the federal treasury $2.5-billion annually, but won’t take effect until the federal government balances its books — which now isn’t expected to take effect until 2015-16, perhaps a year earlier if the Tories are able to cut program costs throughout the government.Harper said the new “Family Tax Cut” will apply to parents with children under 18 and will provide “significant tax relief” to nearly 1.8 million Canadian families who will save an average of $1,300 per year.

He added that the tax cut will make the income-tax system fairer and will reduce tax bills for families. “We understand that family budgets are stretched and by making the tax system fairer for families, we will make it easier for parents to cover the day-to-day cost of raising their kids.”

The Conservatives said that under the current system, couples with the same number of children and the same household income are not treated equally. A two-income couple in which one spouse earns more than the other pays more federal income tax than a two-income couple in which the two spouses earn equal amounts.

Moreover, a single-income couple pays even more, the Tories say.

To highlight the unfairness, the Conservatives gave examples:

• Two parents earning $60,000 and $20,000 respectively pay almost $1,300 more in federal taxes than two parents in an identical household, each earning $40,000.

• A two-parent family in which one spouse is earning $70,000 and the other is staying at home to raise children now pays almost $2,000 more in federal taxes than two parents earning $35,000 each in an identical household.

The promise to allow income-sharing for families with children is similar to another tax measure the Tories gave to pensioners, when they allowed them in 2007 to start splitting their incomes for tax purposes.

The Conservatives said they have already provided tax breaks for families through other measures, including: cutting the GST; establishing a child-care benefit; and creating a fitness tax credit for children in sports.

“Since taking office in 2006, our government has consistently lowered taxes on Canadian families so that they can keep more of their hard-earned money and have the financial security to raise their children and plan for the future,” Harper said.

On Feb. 1, 1988, that always reliable trend-spotter, New York magazine, carried unsettling news on its cover: “Back to the Nest: Grown-up Children Who Move Back.” The article opened with a woman whose mid-20s daughter, running short on money, wanted to reclaim her old room in the family home. The mother was resisting. It violated her expectations. “People of 25 just don’t go home to their mothers,” she said. She was stating what seemed to her an iron rule. Then.

That may have been the first appearance of this subject as a big social problem. Today, after more than two decades, there’s still plenty of nervous talk about the failure-to-launch generation, the boomerang kids. The idea remains a killer of fond parental dreams and many North Americans haven’t yet absorbed the shock. (In some places, notably Italy, it’s much more common and more accepted.)

In the current edition of The Atlantic magazine, Michael Kinsley writes that many Baby Boomers, having paid publicly and privately for their parents’ generation to retire in comfort, now wake up to find that they are also supporting their children, into their 20s and beyond. This week’s New Yorker has a man in a cartoon saying, “I never thought I’d have to move back in with my parents.” He’s in a graveyard, sitting on the stoop of the family tomb.

Stay-around offspring exasperate parents, and can humiliate all concerned. Those who comment on it in public often imply that if young people would only try harder they could work things out for themselves and avoid being a burden. But Marni Jackson’s lively and thoughtful book, Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest, published today, avoids the blaming and shaming that often erupts around this subject. Her great virtue is that she comes through this experience with both her sense of humour and her love for her now 27-year-old son intact.

Jackson sets out to write about how people in their 20s “are taking their time to grow up and leave home.” She calls it a “twilight stage,” when they move out, move back in, then leave again. Naturally, she worries about the results of parental support. Do parents playing the role of landlord undermine the independence of their adult children, or are they simply helping them tackle a much tougher world than the one they faced when starting out?

An anxious mom, full of advice, Jackson can’t keep herself from meddling. She informs her son that the etiquette of applying for a job has in recent years ramped up to a level where every detail matters, even the smallest. “Did he know that?” she wondered. He did, and he tells her to give advice only when asked. Eventually, mother, father and son find ways to accommodate each other’s pride and anxiety.

Revealingly, parents dealing with these problems often sound as if they’ve been unfairly ambushed, not just by a weakened economy but by the reality of adult children. Kinsley’s phrase “wake up” suggests that parents doze off during the first 20-some years.

Parents are often caught off-guard because of their own lack of imagination and their failure to consider the future. Nobody understands, when considering parenthood, that you can’t have babies and you can’t have children. All you can have are human beings. These creatures grow old and remain permanently attached.
Like most long-term projects, parenthood involves more thought and effort than anyone expects; fortunate parents will know their children through many phases, into their 50s, even 60s. In my experience, this is more enriching than almost anything else on Earth. In any case, the nest never really empties (one of Jackson’s points).

Parents are likely to be disappointed if they believe that each generation will function much like the one before (only better, ideally). The complicated fact is that family structures change constantly and always have. They shift unpredictably, affected by everything from new technology and economic failures to widespread divorce and falling birth rates.

I grew up in a three-generation household: children, parents and one grandmother. My mother grew up in a three-generation household: children, mother and one grandfather. No one thought these arrangements odd. If we could accept the truth that civilization never stops changing, we might be less rattled when things fail to work out exactly as we’d hoped.

Maybe it’s because I live in the child-friendly neighbourhood of Park Slope, in Brooklyn, N.Y., where I’m forced to dodge 15 strollers every time I go to the grocery store. Or maybe it’s because I’m 32 and it seems every other woman I know is having a baby. Or maybe it’s because I grew up in rural Texas, surrounded by pregnant teenagers. No matter the reason, I was genuinely surprised to read the recent Pew Research Center study showing that the share of American women who are skipping motherhood has nearly doubled since 1976, rising from 10% of the population to 18%.

Personally, I was happy to see that more women feel free to forgo childbearing. But not everyone shares my enthusiasm. According to Pew, 38% of Americans now denounce childlessness as bad for society. That’s up from 29% just two years ago. So what’s behind the increase in women choosing the non-mom route? According to social conservatives, legal abortions are to blame for declining birth rates. Mike Huckabee told reporter Max Blumenthal that if it weren’t for abortion, there would be no need for immigrants to come work in the United States. Some anti-choicers are issuing dire warnings about a “demographic winter” bringing an end to Western civilization.

Conservative histrionics aside, women who have abortions aren’t the ones causing the uptick in childlessness. After all, 61% of women who have abortions already have one child. And according to a 2004 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, most childless women who have abortions say they are open to the possibility of having kids under different circumstances. However, that doesn’t mean that the passage of Roe vs. Wade had no impact on the upturn in childless women. Defence of legal abortion led feminists to create a national discourse around the concept of “choice,” which helped legitimize the decision to remain childless. This created a space for women who never wanted children to embrace their true desires.

Part of this new self-awareness might mean that women are forsaking motherhood because we’re finally admitting that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As a recent New York magazine cover story documented, parenthood is becoming increasingly miserable because of the exploding expectations placed on mothers — making the child-free lifestyle seem more attractive. In 1988, only 39% of Americans disagreed with the notion that the childless “lead empty lives.” Now a majority — 59% — disagree that childlessness automatically means you’re unfulfilled.

Still, a woman who chooses to remain childless continues to face a series of negative stereotypes, from claims that she’s selfish to implications that she’s too self-centred to remember to breed before it’s too late. But there are upsides to childlessness. Looking around my own apartment, I can see the value in furniture that’s gone unruined, cats that have gone unbothered and a lack of toys cluttering up my floor. But because there is very little research on deliberate childlessness, I thought I would poll childless-by-choice women online to find out their reasons for the decision.

The women I spoke to confirmed my suspicion that the perception of choice had an impact. Natalie, age 29, joked, “Before I knew about sex and reproduction, I thought that pregnancy happened automatically when women got married, and my young self was terrified at the prospect!” Marie Claire captured Kylie Minogue expressing a similar sentiment to Natalie’s: “I never had the feeling I was made for a conventional marriage with a house in the suburbs,” the Australian singer said.

Most felt their desire not to have children is perfectly normal, and were frustrated by stereotypes about women’s biological clocks and the universal desirability of children. Gayle, age 30, drolly observed, “My ovaries do not stir when I see a baby.” Author and filmmaker Laura Scott, who is working on a larger project examining the lives of the childless by choice has found that “lack of maternal/paternal instinct” rated in the top six reasons that respondents gave for their decision, along with reasons such as we “love our life [or] our relationship, as it is” and we “do not want to take on the responsibility.”

Because the Pew research showed an increase in people denouncing childlessness as bad for society, I also asked these childless women how they felt about the social impact of their decision. Most believed that it wasn’t harmful to society and could, in fact, be beneficial. But few spoke about benefits to the environment or women’s pocketbooks. Instead, childless women argued that increasing childlessness is good … for the children.

Dana, age 34, made this case forcefully. “Many children are treated bad or abandoned. Some live their entire lives in foster care.” Tasha, age 27, concurred, noting how many people she’s known who had kids simply because they thought it was what you do, and now make their children suffer for it. “Not everyone will be a good parent,” she argued. “More people should be child-free.”

Not only did the childless not see their choice as inherently selfish, they argued that the choice to have children could be considered selfish in some cases. Natalie agreed that her attachment to her disposable income could be considered selfish but said, on the other hand, “When I ask friends of mine who have/want kids what their reasons are, the answers range from ‘I don’t know’ to ‘I want someone to love me’ to ‘I want someone to take care of me in my old age,’ which are not only also selfish but poorly reasoned.”

Could these childless women be harbingers of a new world, one in which parenthood is considered an active choice and not simply the default state of adulthood? As the Pew research shows, childlessness was once the domain of the highly educated, but now every other segment of society is catching up. Perhaps future generations will look at phenomena like the Jennifer Aniston tabloid womb obsession and wonder how it was possible that anyone could have once cared so much if some women chose not to have babies.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada. In that time the sky has not fallen in on traditional, opposite-sex marriage.

Or perhaps the more accurate thing to say is that same-sex marriage has not caused the sky to fall in on traditional marriage any faster than it was already falling before July 2005 when Parliament made same-sex marriage legal. Same-sex marriage has not sped up the deterioration of traditional marriage.

I disappointed many social-conservative readers half a decade ago when I wrote in favour of same-sex marriage, but at the same time won few friends among advocates of same-sex marriage. It’s not so much that I am in favour of same-sex marriage as I don’t see the harm in letting gays and lesbians marry. Heterosexuals have already hollowed out the institution of marriage so thoroughly that it no longer means what it once did and I see no great interest among heterosexuals in tightening up opposite-sex marriage.

Let me back up a step: Marriage can still mean a great deal, but only if the couple in the relationship make it meaningful to themselves. Governments lost interest in preserving the original significance of the institution decades ago.

There are, to my mind, two aspects to marriage: the personal-commitment side and the public-policy side. Most marrying couples are looking for love, stability, companionship, commitment and a nurturing environment to bring up children. If they can split the family duties in a way that is acceptable to each and have some fun together until death parts them, that’s a bonus. Governments have very little influence over whether marrying couples reach those goals, so most Canadians’ personal interest in the public-policy impact of marriage is negligible.

Government’s interest in sanctioning marriage has mostly been in registering what churches and couples have already sanctified. It could be argued that the state can bolster the family. By creating the legal framework around marriage it can keep marriages intact and ensure children are raised by their birth parents together, all of which has a beneficial impact on social problems: Crime goes down, along with alcoholism, addictions, poverty, dropout rates, spousal abuse and so on.

But states no longer search for the right marriage laws and hadn’t tried to for decades before same-sex marriage became an issue.

For instance, the move to give common-law relationships the same standing in law as traditional marriages started in earnest in the 1960s. By the time the same-sex marriage debate began in the early 2000s, common-law couples had for two decades had nearly all the same legal protections as married couples regarding pensions, communal property, income taxes and insurance awards.

Long before gays and lesbians began insisting on equal marriage rights, heterosexuals had stripped marriage of its public-policy special-ness. More importantly, we heteros were in no hurry to put that humptydumpty back together — to make divorce more difficult, for instance, or strip those living together of their spousal rights.

There are about 9 million families in Canada according to StatsCan. Of those, a little more than 1.4 million are common-law and about 1.4 million are single-parent, while under 55,000 are gay or lesbian. Almost 6.2 million are married families.

Well over half of common-law and married couples have children, while just under 10% of same-sex couples do. That means there are maybe 6,000 gay and lesbian couples with children, versus more than 500,000 common-law families.

Just statistically, then, which nontraditional family type is likelier to have the greater impact on Canada’s social well-being?

A 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that children of cohabiting parents are five times as likely to suffer a family breakup as children living with both of their natural parents, and we know the children of broken families are more likely to drop out, have a run-in with police or take drugs.

So why aren’t all those opposed to same-sex marriage in the name of defending marriage for the good of children, not fighting common-law relationships every bit as energetically?

Over the past five years, same-sex marriage has done nothing to harm the personal-commitment side of heterosexual marriage and no more to harm the public-policy side than we heteros had been doing for decades.

National Post[caption id="attachment_6212" align="alignnone" width="620" caption="Matt Mueller/Handout"]<a rel="attachment wp-att-6212" href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/06/25/peter-jackson-wants-to-direct-the-hobbit-films/cnsphoto-portman-bones/"><img class="size-full wp-image-6212" title="CNSPhoto-Portman-Bones" src="http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2010/06/peterjackson.jpg&quot; alt="" width="620" height="413" /></a>[/caption]
Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth mythology have been fawning over the prospect of The Hobbit coming to the screen for ages. And it looks like their fantasies may soon become a reality.
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has every intention of directing the two-film adaptation and is currently negotiating with Warner Bros, New Line and MGM, according to <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2010/06/urgent-peter-jackson-negotiating-to-direct-the-hobbit-films/">Deadline</a&gt;.
Last month, Guillermo del Toro, known for his creature-friendly flicks <em>Pan's Labyrinth</em> and <em>Hellboy</em>, was slated to direct the films but dropped out last month, adding to the development hell that has been brewing since 1995.
del Toro had been working with Jackson for the past two years as a co-writer and director but left by citing conflicts in filming schedules.
Executive Producer and now, expected director Peter Jackson released a statement to TheOneRing.net expressing sadness over del Toro's departure.
"The bottom line is that Guillermo just didn't feel he could commit six years to living in New Zealand, exclusively making these films, when his original commitment was for three years," said Jackson.
Jackson's rise to the director's seat is no surprise considering he is based out of New Zealand and spent a total of around five years shooting <em>the Lord of the Rings</em> Trilogy.
No official confirmation has been released but internet buzz is suggesting the deal will most likely see the 48-year-old director return to the franchise.
Deadline is reporting that Jackson is trying to remove himself from other film obligations in order to direct <em>The Hobbit</em>.
Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Andy Serkis (Gollum), and Hugo Weaving (Elrond) are all expected to reprise their roles.

As reported on the front page of Thursday’s National Post, an Ottawa couple has filed a human right complaint against a trendy wine bar that refused to admit their three-month-old child. Before we judge the merits of the case, we need to accept a basic truth: There are exactly two ways to police the war over the presence of small children in fine restaurants: glares and rules.

The glare system works like this: A few years ago, on a Sunday, I took my wife and 1-year-old for brunch at a pub-style restaurant in Toronto’s Danforth neighbourhood. The place is full of polished wood and transatlantic accents, and sells a long list of exotic beers and whiskeys. Normally, it’s not an ideal spot for a child who still uses a bib and sippy cup — but this was 11am. The pub was mostly empty. The heavy drinkers wouldn’t start rolling in for a while.

My mistake. As as soon as we sat down, a group of old biddies sipping their lime gimlet boxcars (or whatever it is these people drink) glared holes through my baby bjorn. Inescapably, I was reminded of the scene in Easy Rider, when Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were stared down by a bunch of local rednecks at a Louisiana coffee shop.

Sadly, the gimlet set were regulars, and had the waitress on their side. On some very thin pretext — I think my daughter made a hash of her paper placemat — this aproned apparatchik rushed over to our table in a great theatrical spasm of exasperation, chiding us to mind our child’s manners. In true Easy Rider style, we revved up the stroller and made for the parish line.

That’s the way the glare system works: It’s unpleasant and inexact. As a parent, your fortune depends on who else happens to be at the restaurant when you arrive, who happens to be your waiter, and what happens to be their mood.

Rules work much better. When you show up at the Wynn casino on the Las Vegas Strip, you see a sign that says “To ensure our guests’ safety, strollers are not permitted.” That’s hogwash, of course: If the Wynn truly cared about “safety,” they’d be more concerned about the razor-sharp stiletto heels on the hookers tittering around the high-roller craps tables. But what’s important is that the rule is there — however disingenuously expressed — right on the door: Kids not welcome. No glares required.

My health club operates on similar principles. A generation ago, the rule was that kids were welcome — until 2pm, at which time they were non grata anywhere in the building. Then the club got taken over by people like me, modern baby-bjorn types who just couldn’t bear to be separated from their offspring. The 2pm rule was scrapped. Instead, new rules were created: No kids in the upstairs lounge and (fancier) dining room. No kids in the pool before lunchtime. No kids in the bar area. And so on.

Again: All spelled out in black and white. Again: No glares required.

All of which to say: Restaurants and wine bars that don’t welcome children should not only be permitted to put up signs saying as much — they should be encouraged to do so — so that we breeders can make our patronage decisions accordingly.

One way or another, restaurant owners are going to make their feelings felt about my child’s presence. For my sake and theirs, they might as well be explicit about it.

National Post

jkay@nationalpost.com

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-hail-the-no-baby-zone/feed0stdChild eatingA place to live downtown — with the kidshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/a-place-to-live-downtown-with-the-kids
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/a-place-to-live-downtown-with-the-kids#commentsTue, 27 Apr 2010 23:55:57 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=1096

City councillors today approved new condo towers that include 94 units big enough to house families, as the city hunts for ways to make downtown more child-friendly.

Rising out of what is now a parking lot at Richmond and Simcoe streets, the complex also includes retail, restaurants, and an 8,000-square-foot gallery for the Ontario College of Art and Design. The two glass towers, 31 and 41-storeys, look like boxes stacked on top of one another, said Les Klein, lead architect from Quadrangle Architects.

“The rest of the city has got this notion of segregated land use planning and what we’re trying to do here is integrate all the forms: institutional, cultural, commercial, retail, and residential all on the same sites and create vertical neighbourhood so that they become more sustainable,” said Councillor Adam Vaughan, who has been pushing more eclectic developments in his half of Trinity Spadina ward.

Mr. Vaughan is hoping to activate sidewalks with a vibrant commercial district, and by encouraging couples to raise their children downtown.

Mr. Vaughan is a loud proponent of family housing and has insisted that new developments in his ward design 10% of units as three bedrooms, or large enough that they could be easily converted into them. A proposed policy to require that same quota in all new downtown buildings with more than 100 units is being reviewed by planning staff, after developers voiced concerns they would be forced to build units they couldn’t sell. It is set to be discussed at the public works and infrastructure committee meeting in June.

“The industry as a whole believes the city shouldn’t be dictating product that we believe there isn’t a demand for,” said Leona Savoie, chair of the Toronto chapter of BILD, the Building, Industry Land Development Association. “It could pretty much be documented all across the board from our membership that typically the larger suites are a very tough sell, especially in certain parts of the city,” she said, since three bedrooms go for around $600,000 and that’s too expensive for many young families.

Mr. Vaughan acknowledged the challenges, and said the city is looking at ways to help keep the costs of building bigger units down, like exempting builders from development charges on common space for kids, or using some of the development fees to offset the cost.

The Richmond and Simcoe development, built by Aspen Ridge Homes, has managed to offer a range of suite prices by playing with the size of three bedroom units, from 890 square feet to 1,200, said Mr. Klein, of Quadrangle.

“Toronto’s view of family housing is pretty conservative and we think there’s a segment of our community that wants to live downtown, is prepared to raise families there,” said Mr. Klein. “We think it’s important in terms of providing an economic basis for a broader range of services.”